+ Well-designed façades can avoid the need for heating or cooling technology.

Surely it’s high time we gave our buildings some clothes. Being able to adapt your outer layer brings great benefits because it saves you heating energy in the winter and cooling energy in the summer. That sounds like a good strategy for buildings, but we almost never adopt it.

We need to take inspiration from clothing – an adaptation of the skin that gives humans a wide range of performance. It can be water resistant. It can be highly insulating, or cool and highly ventilated. And it enables us to express all sorts of changing messages.

Clothing can adapt your skin to suit the time of day, the seasons, the weather, your activity and your mood. In contrast, animals have to make do with an outer layer that is a reasonable compromise for their habitat. The best of them grow and shed fur or plumage to adapt a bit to the changing seasons, but they can do nothing about the weather from day to day.

Animals have to burn energy to stay warm (or just accept a slowdown if they are reptiles) in cold weather and sweat precious moisture to stay cool in hot weather. Of course, there are some amazing adaptations and behaviours to make the best of it, but they don’t have the same benefit as clothes.

Yet we choose not to clothe our buildings. So far, we have found it easier and cheaper to consume energy than to adapt the dress of our buildings. Running a gas boiler to keep a building warm in winter is like shivering in shorts and a T-shirt, while trying to keep your body temperature up by eating a constant stream of doughnuts.

If we are going to make buildings really energy-efficient in future, we should not assume they have to stay naked. We should clothe them in facades that can change performance properties over a wide enough range to eliminate the need for internal heating and cooling systems.

Of course, we should make the most of available solar energy – like basking lizards, and available cooling breeze and rain – like wallowing elephants. But we should not assume that wearing nothing but a pair of reactive sunglasses is enough to make our buildings smart.

More buildings need to dress themselves like Al Bahar Towers in Abu Dhabi or 1 Bligh Street in Sydney, which represent the state of the art in building clothes. 1 Bligh Street’s double-skin façade features automated blinds that adapt to the sun’s path, allowing optimal temperature and light control. Al Bahar has a responsive, dynamic skin thanks to its movable shading system, which reduces the effects of high ambient temperatures and intense solar radiation.

However, for all its innovation Al Bahar’s skin doesn’t provide thermal insulation. So how can we take this idea of clothing buildings further? How can we configure a bigger range of clothes for our buildings and overcome the idea that a building is stuck in one skin?

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Comments /

Rudi Scheuermann

I don't think that buildings were naked historically. Buildings has to react to their invironment to be able to make live in them feasible. Buildings had external and sometimes internal shutters to react towards the sun and even to rain and snow and ice. Window sizes and layers, depths of reviels and overhanging roofs etc were varied in reaction to the sun and thus created architecturl regional flavours.

But with the modern movement and a wide avaialability of energy provision the skill of adapting buildings to their environment got more and more ignored with the aim to make an internationsl style possible everywhere. The desire to build all glass facades wherever and not even reacting with the glass layers and coatings in some regions of the world because energy was readily avaialble and considered cheaper than the primary investment cost of the right facade have proofed to be wrong.

I think it is our task as envelope consultants to focus on the right approaches and to creat the awareness and the outstanding references to proof that we have the skill and knowledge to ***** buildings appropriately. This will require that we get involved right at the beginning of a design sitting with the architects to develop the right approach. it is the only time in a design where we have a chance to significantly influence the energy consumption of a building and therefore the "clothes of the building".

And what's more, I think the world will benefit from regional approaches as it will help to develope an architectural culture again.

Stephen Blackmore

I like the analogy with fur and feathers and although those biological solutions are probably not ideal for a building (though they might be fun) I am sure that a good layer of plants can help - fortunately there are more and more vertical gardens and roof top gardens but my personal fantasy is that cityscapes of the future might look more or less like a forest.....

Heather Kikkert

Reminds me of a book I read called: "Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan" (by Azby Brown), which looked at Japan during the Edo period and what envirnomental lessons we can learn from how they dealt with environmental problems (water, waste, raw materials, etc).

One thing that sticks in my mind was a framework that shaded the windows. In summer a food plant (like beans) grew up it to provide shade (and food). While in winter, when the warmth of the sun was desired, the plant had either lost it's leaves or finished for the season. Great for small, household scale, but would need thought to apply on a larger scale (like Arup works with).

Grzegorz Babiszewski

To paraphrase the question:"Why are businessmen/women still naked?"I.e. why everywhere we do business we have to have jackets, shoes, socks, long sleeve shirts? Surly adopting our clothing to local climate (say sandals and shorts in the Middle East) would be the easiest way to reduce cooling/ heating energy requirements/ CO2 emissions...

And this was already proved in Japan:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Biz_campaign

In summary I agree with "clothing buildings", but at the start of the project let's "cloth the occupants" as well:)

Daniel Lu

Modular building facades could be a start. A recent online campaign, Phonebloks, has been pushing for a phone with replaceable parts. This has potential to reduce waste, because it could mean that people can just replace their phone CPU with a better chip, rather than throwing away the entire phone.

The ultimate challenge is designing a plug and play framework around which the parts could connect. This same concept can be applied to facades. Should actual weather patterns vary significantly (perhaps due to climate change) from predicted energy models, facade components can be replaced with more insulation or more glazing to better fit. Changing the building envelope's WWR could become an economically viable retrofit compared to mechanical retrofits.

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